Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Ultimately then, literary texts like Gerlach’s novel played a key part in shaping the collective memory of the German people. These texts were well received by readers because they told a story that met with general consensus, which was recounted ‘in the service of creating a national identity’. According to the historians Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, the collective memory, and hence the groups or authorities promoting it, are all aimed at establishing ‘macro-histories’ or ‘master narratives’. The ‘narrative of soldierly victimhood’ was one such ‘coherent account of history, told from an unambiguous perspective […]’, whose shaping force not only had the effect of ‘creating a whole genre of literature’ but also attained ‘public pre-eminence’. The ‘master narrative’ of the ordinary soldier as the sufferer and victim acquired validity throughout the whole of society in the Federal Republic only after it had been ‘given concrete shape, disseminated and institutionalized’. The ‘narrative of soldierly victimhood’ became common currency in the 1950s because it reflected ‘cultural trends of the age’, caught ‘the tenor of the times’ and deployed ‘appropriate ways and means… of making itself heard both within its specialist field and in the wider world’. For the reasons outlined, that also applied specifically to Heinrich Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel, which over time became a bestseller. After just three months, it had sold more than 30,000 copies. In 1959 Gerlach’s The Forsaken Army was awarded the Premio Bancarella, an Italian literary prize established in 1953; previous winners included Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1953) and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1958). While Gerlach had initially considered the loss of his manuscript in captivity as the price he’d had to pay for his life and freedom, when it came to it he wasn’t prepared to pay it. ‘I’d expended too much effort and nervous energy on that book to give it up for lost without a fight,’ he asserted. Ultimately, it appeared, he’d won his fight. But another was soon to follow.

In my first attempts to piece together the story of Heinrich Gerlach’s bestseller about Stalingrad, I naturally found myself drawn to the spectacular hypnosis experiment, since it had to do with questions touching on certain aspects of our research into memory. But on closer investigation, it turned out that the story of the genesis of The Forsaken Army did not end with the runaway success of the published novel. I uncovered a report in the news magazine Der Spiegel on an unusual dispute that was without precedent in the history of German jurisprudence and medicine. It appeared on 29 January 1958 and began:

Senior teacher Dr Heinrich Gerlach, 49, from Brake, near Bremen, has unexpectedly found himself at the centre of an astonishing controversy unprecedented in the history of German literature. It has generated so much publicity for his first work – the Stalingrad novel The Forsaken Army – that the Nymphenburg publishing house only needed to make a few standard promotional statements when it announced the imminent publication of the sixth edition of the novel (26,000th–30,000th copies) to booksellers last week. This publicity-generating controversy is being fought out between the writer Gerlach and the Munich psychotherapist Dr Karl Schmitz, 69. Wide-ranging legal briefs prepared by the lawyers for both parties in the dispute are further inflaming the dispute, which goes back to a curious experiment: Dr Schmitz, who recently published a book on his ‘completely new insights into hypnosis’ (with the title Healing Through Hypnosis ), claims that Heinrich Gerlach was only able to get his novel on Stalingrad down on paper in the first place thanks to his skill in the art of hypnotism. On the basis of this conviction and various select pieces of evidence, the physician Schmitz is hoping that the court will recognize his claim to 20 per cent of the author’s earnings from the bestseller as his rightful share of the profits.

The article went on to recount the curious story of the manuscript lost in Soviet captivity, the hypnosis experiment in Munich and the unexpected success of the book. Following the novel’s success, after an interval of seven years Dr Schmitz once again entered the picture:

Meanwhile, hypnosis specialist Schmitz found himself obliged to refresh his former patient’s memory for a second time, by sending him a copy of the participation agreement from 1951. Taken aback, the author Gerlach acknowledged that the signature on this unorthodox contract was indeed his, but pointed out that he may well have signed the document at a time when he was not in full possession of his mental faculties.

Subsequently – according to Der Spiegel – Heinrich Gerlach sent an enquiry through his solicitor to the ‘Regional Medical Association of the City and District of Munich’, asking whether such a contract between a doctor and his patient did not in fact infringe against the professional code of physicians and should therefore be deemed unethical. Dr Schmitz, who learned of this enquiry, in turn approached his professional body, requesting that it confirm to him the rectitude of his position on the basis of the law as it pertained to doctors. However, the president of the doctor’s professional organization could not be persuaded by either Heinrich Gerlach or Dr Schmitz to deliver an unequivocal opinion on the matter. In the meantime, Gerlach had offered to pay Dr Schmitz a commensurate fee for his medical treatment. Dr Schmitz had turned this down, though, insisting on the legality of his ‘private literary agreement’. His words were quoted verbatim in Der Spiegel :

For the German edition of 30,000 copies at 17.80 Deutschmarks apiece, Gerlach (who earns 10 per cent of the retail price) has pocketed a total of DM 53,400! On a rough calculation, according to this I should have received around 10,000 Marks. Not to mention foreign and film and other rights, which bring in even more revenue!

For his part, Dr Schmitz suggested to Gerlach that they agree to submit themselves to an arbitration ruling by the Munich Medical Practitioners’ Association. The Spiegel report ended with some fighting talk by the doctor: ‘If Gerlach won’t agree to this, I’ll see him in court. Who knows, otherwise people might start claiming I’d tricked him into signing the contract while he was under hypnosis.’

Two days later, the Süddeutsche Zeitung also reported on the legal dispute. The journalist who wrote the piece, Ernst Bäumler, followed Der Spiegel in sketching out the story of the novel. In order to give the reader an idea of the positions of the two parties in the dispute, he had interviewed them both. Dr Schmitz argued that Gerlach had not approached him as a ‘normal patient’. ‘He wasn’t ill,’ said Schmitz, ‘rather, he clearly intended that I should help him create a transcription of his book. That’s why I didn’t demand a single penny in fees from him for the countless experiments we conducted, but instead a share of the profits.’ Furthermore, Schmitz pointed to letters from Gerlach that seemed to confirm him in his belief that he, Gerlach, had also understood their arrangement to be a ‘business partnership’. Gerlach, on the other hand, maintained that he had no recollection of entering into any agreement with Dr Schmitz. The first thing he knew of the existence of the contract, he claimed, was when Schmitz sent him a copy. Asked whether Dr Schmitz might possibly have extracted a signature from him while he was under hypnosis, Gerlach gave a very cagey response: ‘I’d be wary of drawing such an inference. All I would say is that the course of treatment put me in a position of some dependence upon the doctor.’ Heinrich Gerlach also had different memories of the actual experiments: